Heart So Hungry (10 page)

Mina Hubbard’s expedition, June 1905

M
INA
H
UBBARD SAT ALONE
in her cramped cabin, a dismal little cubicle stinking of grease and dirt, as the
Harlow
steamed west across Lake Melville out of Rigolet in eastern Labrador. Nearly two years had passed since her husband’s death but she remained dressed all in black. As on her previous steamer trip to Labrador, she felt sick to her stomach—maybe because of the
Harlow
’s lurch across the bay, maybe because of the same malady that had laid low Joe Iserhoff. Like Joe, Mina felt feverish one minute, chilled to the bone the next. Fortunately, she had not yet developed the chest cold that kept rattling young Joe with violent coughs, so maybe her illness was of a different nature. Maybe she was sick because of what George had told her not long ago—that Dillon Wallace and his party had come aboard.

Or perhaps it was a different kind of dread that made her legs weak and her stomach queasy—the fear of what lay ahead, beyond Grand Lake. The conviction that she was doomed to fail.

How could she possibly succeed when her beloved Laddie, so courageous and capable and bold, had been defeated by the very
task she now set for herself? No, she would fail, of this she was certain—though in truth a part of her was looking forward to that inevitability as the only sure way to put an end to her misery.

To make matters worse, she now sat doubled over with nausea. The disquiet had been building in her stomach ever since she set foot aboard the
Harlow
, but the pain had doubled with word of Wallace’s arrival. He was up there on deck somewhere, no doubt strutting around as if he owned the place, playing the hero.

The fear in her was as cold as the chill Atlantic, but the rage in her burned. One minute her skin was on fire, eyes stinging, breath coming in gasps, and the next minute she felt small and trembling and terrified.

Wallace and his party had arrived in Rigolet with only minutes to spare before the
Harlow
weighed anchor, and now their gear lay piled above her on the foredeck. George, wonderful George, had immediately reported the news to her. He had described each man in Wallace’s party, offered his assessment of how fit or unfit each appeared for the trials ahead. Mina had listened stoically, holding everything in check, giving no indication of the roil of emotions at work in her.

Wallace would later describe his crew in this manner:

To round out the crew, “It was desirable to have at least one Indian in the party as woodsman, hunter and general camp servant.”
This was to be Peter Stevens, a full-blooded Ojibway from Minnesota who spoke only halting English.

Richards, like Easton, was a student and therefore some twenty years younger than Wallace, and he was an eager, and strong-looking fellow. Easton was much thinner but no less eager, and he had had some experience as a wilderness canoeist. Stanton, in his late thirties, was the oldest man in the crew next to Wallace. Though Stanton couldn’t lay claim to much wilderness experience, Wallace thought of him as a friend in light of the time they had spent together in Labrador two years earlier, when Wallace was recuperating from the ordeal of his first expedition.

That Mina had once thought of Wallace as a friend, had welcomed him into her home, had fed him at her table, this galled her more than she dared express to George or anyone else. She suspected that, even if Wallace had not directly caused her husband’s death, he had at least abetted it by doing less than he might have to prevent it—far less than her husband would have done had their positions been reversed. Furthermore, Wallace had publicly besmirched her Laddie’s reputation. And why? So as to make himself appear wiser, more capable than the man who had befriended him? It seemed to her that the only purpose to Wallace’s expedition was further self-aggrandizement, carried out under the guise of completing Laddie’s work. If Wallace was successful, it would utterly destroy her husband’s name.

How dare he? she asked the empty room, her stomach suddenly gripped by cramps.
How dare he?

She could picture Wallace and his party topside, either strolling about or stretched out on deck chairs, bundled up against the fog and chill, sucking their pipes. Wallowing in arrogance.

She pulled herself to her feet, braced herself against the bunk. No, she would not cower like a mouse in this cabin, no matter how ill she felt. Wallace was the interloper here, not she. It was her duty to fulfill her husband’s mission, not Wallace’s, no matter how
much noise he made about his and Laddie’s bond, their “plighted troth.”

So no, she would not change out of her mourning clothes, not just yet. She had read the looks that met her all along the way from New York City to Rigolet, she knew the thoughts behind those looks. She defied each and every suggestion that she had mourned long enough. How dare anyone question her grief?

Out into the corridor she went, pulling herself along, up onto the deck. She would go wherever she pleased on this ship. Let anyone try to stop her. Maybe Wallace had caught up with her in Rigolet, erasing her slim lead, but it would make no difference. Neither he nor the gossipmongers nor the icebergs nor an army of judgmental looks would deter her. Laddie was hers and hers alone, and he was with her, always with her. He would show her the way.

A pewter sky, a chilling blast of air. Mina stood at the rail and looked down at black water. The wind buffeted her, blasted straight through her coat. But the air was bracing as well. The scent of a frigid sea stripped the nausea out of her, washed the sour taste from her mouth. Such bleakness wherever she looked, such desolation. Still, she could not help but acknowledge something exciting about the challenge of this place, something elemental, almost primeval. Maybe that was why Laddie had been so drawn to the wild. Challenge and risk brought out the best in him, he always said; made him feel wholly alive. Perhaps they would do the same for her.

She heard voices, a broken conversation, words muted and scattered by the fog. She turned mid-ship and peered through the haze. A pair of figures stood some thirty feet away. The scent of pipe smoke hung in the air. She knew without being able to see him clearly that one of the men was Wallace. She knew too, because the moment held that breathless quality of the preordained, that he would turn and come toward her.

A minute or so later he did just that, though apparently unaware of Mina pressed against the rail, half-concealed in fog. He covered
most of the distance between them before he noticed her and came to a halt. Neither could see the other’s face, only a silhouette, grey upon grey. But Mina would not allow herself to cower. She reached along the rail, pulled herself forward, set herself in motion.

As Wallace’s face came into view, and as he too stepped forward, a sudden flutter knotted her stomach. She almost jerked away. But no, she must not. Laddie would never have flinched and neither would she. Her gait stiffened but she refused to shorten her stride, refused to turn away by so much as an inch. Instead, she marched toward him, her eyes locked on his now but seeing nothing, only greyness all around.

When they were but steps apart, Wallace drew his pipe from his mouth and wet his lips, was about to speak. A hand came up toward his hat. Mina’s gaze drilled into him. And at the last moment he looked away, he averted his eyes as she strode past.

She continued on with the most forceful strides she could manage, another six feet, then six feet more. Then one knee buckled and she gripped the rail and held herself in place, hand to cold metal. Her legs were trembling, a shiver was building in her chest. Yet she could not help but smile. Wallace had been the one to falter, not she. Might it be a harbinger of what lay ahead? Was it conceivable after all that, with Laddie’s help, her Laddie’s strength, she might actually succeed?

She drew in a slow, full breath. Looked out across black water. No, Wallace could not stop her. Nothing short of death could stop her now.

Around six
p.m
. on the evening of June 23, the
Harlow
dropped anchor near the southern end of Lake Melville, where the lumber camp of Kenemish was located behind a cove on the eastern shore. Immediately Wallace and his crew started loading up their canoes, eager to paddle the twelve miles across Lake Melville to the Hudson’s Bay Company post at the mouth of the Northwest River.
Before launching into the interior by crossing Grand Lake and heading up the Naskapi River, they intended to complete their provisioning from the post’s stores and repack the canoes a final time.

Wallace’s frenzied if somewhat disorganized activity disconcerted Mina. If she allowed him to take the lead now, right out of the gate, she might never catch up with him. But Joe Iserhoff remained ill and she could not very well force him into a canoe to start paddling.

George suggested that he and Job go ahead in one of the canoes. At the French trading post, across the river from the Hudson’s Bay post, they would gather up the last of their provisions and make everything ready for a plunge into the unknown. Mina agreed. With a mix of relief (that at least part of her party was underway) and frustration (that it was not the whole party), she watched as George and Job set off, their paddles chopping rhythmically at the dark water, flinging up glimmering drops in the cool evening light. Wallace’s crew, yet to lower their canoes into the water, continued to debate the proper positioning of their packs.

Mina knew that at this point in the race hers was a merely symbolic lead of a few minutes, not significant enough to elicit a smile from her lips as she watched from the rail. But she revelled in the triumph of having a canoe underway before Wallace did, and in that secret place inside where no one but Laddie could see, she was clapping and laughing with delight.

It was a long two days for Mina. She nursed Joe Iserhoff back to health and, in her spare time, walked all about Kenemish, too restless to sit still for long. So near to setting off on a venture that, one way or the other, could only bring her husband closer, she found the wait excruciating. Yet even through the grey rains and the heavy fogs that came and went over that bleak landscape, she felt her husband near. And she could sense his eagerness too, his excitement at the prospect of a second chance. From time to time, in rare and wonderful moments, she would notice a dog trotting through the street, tail
whipping back and forth, or see a chevron of geese flying overhead, honking directions to one another, and suddenly she would feel the warmth of Laddie’s body as he walked beside her, the flush of joy he took in such simple observations. But these escapes from reality were all too brief, and when they ebbed it was always abruptly, like a hammer blow to her chest, a staggering return of awful knowledge.

Not until late Saturday night did George return to Kenemish. Mina was packed and waiting. Joe, despite his wan appearance, vowed that he could make the twelve-mile paddle to the French post without breaking a sweat. So off they went in the second canoe.

In the dark hours of early morning, Monsieur Duclos, the agent in charge of the French post, finally welcomed Mina into his home. The house was warm and comfortable, and the food Mina was served seemed, in comparison to the fare she had suffered for the past several days, exquisite. Still, she had no wish to linger. From behind the windows of Monsieur Duclos’s home she gazed out at the lake to where the land began its rise toward a range of blue mountains capped with snow.

On the opposite shore of the Northwest River was a scattering of low white buildings, those of the Hudson’s Bay Company, and from time to time Mina watched anxiously as one or two of Wallace’s men wandered down to the docks. Are they starting out? she asked herself, and held her breath as she waited to see if the canoes would be carried down to the water now, fully loaded and ready to launch. But no, it was only George Richards, the student of geology, scuffling along the shore, picking up stones. Or it was Pete Stevens, the Ojibway guide, sniffing at the wind.

A final man had been added to Wallace’s crew at the North West River Post, but George kept this information to himself as long as he could. George needed four strong men, including himself, to man his outfit’s two canoes, and he had hoped to find Duncan McLean at the post and hire him to join them. Duncan was one of the men George had dispatched two years earlier to rescue Wallace
and Hubbard, and one of the men who had hauled Hubbard’s body out of the wilderness. But Wallace had gotten to Duncan first, before Duncan even realized that his old friend was in the area. So instead George persuaded Monsieur Duclos to grant a leave of absence to one of his employees, a boy named Gilbert Blake. He was only nineteen but a hard worker and a merry-hearted lad. More important to Mina, Gilbert had also been a member of the party that recovered her husband’s body. She could not resist posing the same questions to Gilbert that she had already asked a dozen times of George.